Homes? Three. Tax returns? None of your business. He invests in the same exotic places a James Bond villain might, the Cayman Islands and a Swiss bank account.

He said he has feared getting a “pink slip” – and his firm was responsible for plenty of them at companies it took over. Maybe that’s because, as he said himself, “I like to fire people….” - never mind that he was talking about health insurance companies, not steelworkers. Some people think the man was even mean to his own dog.

All that’s missing from this menacing portrait of Romney – if you listen to the Democratic message points – is a Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl.

Never mind that some of these events are taken out of context or distorted beyond recognition. Romney’s an easy figure for mockery, simple to tag as an out-of-touch rich guy – a caricature even simpler to sketch than the one Republicans made of John Kerry in 2004, and in 2012, potentially even more devastating.

At a time when Democrats are prepared to stoke a little class resentment, they may well be able to pigeonhole the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination into the narrative President Barack Obama laid out in his State of the Union address: the rich versus rest of us.

And the reality is, Romney himself is helping them do it.

It’s more than miscues here and there - it’s Romney’s way of talking about jobs, or firing service providers, or wealth, or taxes, by a man whose success in the business world came in private equity, a field that not many Americans understand easily and which his campaign has done little to define. And it all plays into the narrative of Romney as disconnected from average people.

“The problem isn’t that he’s rich,” said Democratic strategist Jim Jordan, who worked for Kerry. “Americans don’t dislike rich politicians. The Senate’s full of them, and the White House has been, too. FDR and Kennedy and plenty of others have understood how middle-class Americans live, their aspirations and worries. Romney just doesn’t have the gift of empathy. He doesn’t understand most Americans and he doesn’t care and his language and, worse, his policies make that all too obvious to voters. Which is why most of them, more all the time, simply dislike him.”

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul dismissed the issue as a “frenzy” created by Democrats with “the help of the liberal media…(in an) attempt to mask the fact that on this President’s watch, more Americans have seen job losses than under any president in modern history.”

“Long-term unemployment has soared to record levels, median income has fallen, and family budgets are being squeezed like never before,” she said. “What does it say about the values of a president that he believes he is doing a good job when record numbers of Americans are suffering? Gov. Romney has said from the start of this campaign that he will focus on helping relieve the crushing burden on the middle class. These Americans are concerned with their livelihoods, not manufactured press hysteria.”